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Why Chinese painting is history.
In her article "Japanese Art History 2001: The State and Stakes of Research," Professor Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan examined the current state of Japanese art scholarship and noted that "up through the 1990s, many senior scholars were caught in a time warp of nineteenth-century notions about style and aesthetic value on the one hand and art as the expression of spirit or nation on the other." (1) Clearly, by the early twenty-first century, any such suspected link between art and nation would be anathema to the postmodern art scholar. Yiengpruksawan's call for reexamining the conceptualization of Japanese art history, significantly, is part of the general rethinking of art history in this country. This process of reexamination--related to the "deconstruction" of the humanities as a whole--has raised fundamental questions about the nature and place of the study of East Asian art in the postmodern world.
Yiengpruksawan wrote that the creation of a modern Japanese art history "amounted to the fixing of one template, the post-Enlightenment European order of things, atop another, the Japanese conventions of knowledge that had existed for generations on the Chinese model." (2) According to one way of looking at East Asian art, before traditional Japanese art history can be understood, its foundation in the ancient Chinese model must first be examined. (3) The "Crisis" in Art History What is required of the historian [now] is to discover the national or ethnic culturally discrete meanings of a certain [different] kind of visual language, rather than to integrate those meanings within an allegedly universal system because such a system is often seen as being culturally restricted, if not, in fact, a tool of cultural imperialism. The history of art required by new countries in old worlds is not one that relates them to the West but one that proclaims their differences--Oleg Grabar, "On the Universality of the History of Art" (4) The rethinking of art history in this country began officially with the winter 1982 issue of the Art Journal, dedicated to the theme of "The Crisis in the Discipline." In the "Editor's Statement," Henri Zerner pointed to two major concerns of modern art history. The first is "the need to rethink the object of art history... [because] the specific definition of art with which it has been associated since the Renaissance becomes less and less workable... . At stake are not only the new fields of study--the artifacts of early humanity, preColumbian art or whatever 'exotic' cultural phenomena- but also our understanding of Western art." The other concern is a "profound contradiction" embodied by traditional art history: On the one hand it holds on to an idealist theory of art according to which art is an absolute autonomous value that transcends history, that is not subject to the constraints of time and space, so that, strictly speaking, there can be no history of art. ... On the other hand it is attached to an optimistic form of nineteenth-century positivism, to a belief... [that] history had to give the semblance of a chain of cause and effect.... The history of style has been the attempt to establish a narrative or causal chain within the assumed autonomy of art. (5) The "crisis" in the discipline that Zerner described appears to consist of simply the polarities of our field-the dialectic between aesthetics and history, form and content, past and present-that have animated the modern critical study of art. More to the point is Oleg Grabar's "On the Universality of the History of Art," which appeared in the same issue of the Art Journal. A leading specialist of Islamic art, Grabar pointed out, "What is required of the historian [now] is to discover the national or ethnic culturally discrete meanings of a certain [different] kind of visual language." Contemporary views of history and art history have taught us to reject the authority of earlier discourses-their terminologies, concepts, and assumptions-especially those connected with nineteenth-century positivism, which states that scientific principles must be the a priori basis for definitive, correct, and true interpretations. It was the early nineteenthcentury philosopher Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) who first inspired the belief that art offered the means through which the human spirit could be expressed in historically specific ways. Using the word Wissenschaft, "science," as the basis for philosophical system building, Hegel was governed by the historicism he stressed as essential to the life of the spirit. Following his lead, many cultural and art historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assumed that all artistic styles and forms reflected all other aspects of the culture in which they developed or wer...See the full content of this document
